Two French Novels

THE dawn and the twilight, that moment when the stars pale in the brightening sky, and that when the vanished sun lends its rose rays to the clouds, its gold to the risen moon, are alike the inspiration of the painter, the times when Nature seems to hold the secret in her hand most near and open to the earth. In history, also, the great epochs of exhaustion and of renewal command the supreme interest of student and philosopher, listening to catch from the lips of an expiring world the word in which its experience is summed, or to seize the primal meaning of the message with which a new world is starting into life. From age to age men go back to these crises of thought with emotions as diverse as those which clashed or mingled then, taking part with the vanquished or with the triumphant idea, or finding in the juxtaposition of the two a spell which neither could exercise alone upon his mind, as the artist finds a harmony in the blending of two lights. It is in such a period, in the early Christian centuries, that M. Anatole France has laid the scene of his latest novel, Thaïs.¹ To readers of English speech Thaïs will be very likely to suggest a comparison with Marius the Epicurean. Neither book is an historical novel, in the ordinary sense of the word ; each is the result of intellectual curiosity and of literary fastidiousness. M. Anatole France is a délicat ; one might go a step further, and say a raffiné. Mr. Pater is an æsthete, which is the English word corresponding to the latter rather than to the former term. Mr. Pater presented, in Marius, together with a careful study of Rome under Marcus Aurelius, a view of the gradual passage of the old thought into the new in an individual mind. His work was in the theological sense constructive, in the æsthetic piously decorative. In a style which had the attenuated beauty of “ linkèd sweetness long drawn out,” he set before us “ the tender grace of a day that is dead,” leading his hero through guarded passageways of thought into the tranquil glow of a new era. Marius the Epicurean was a careful and elaborate performance, but it somehow lacked salt. It appealed to the intellect, but failed to stimulate it. We confess that, for our own part, we prefer Thaïs, with its beauty, not of artistic research, but of art, and its indication of an intelligence perpetually alive, and abounding in little surprises of idea and unlookedfor delicacies of phrase.

M. Anatole France takes us, not to Italy, but to Egypt; to a desert peopled with anchorites, and an Alexandria inhabited by philosophers of all schools and dilettanti of every shade. In the desert, Paphnuce the monk, praying in his hermitage, is visited by the recollection of the beautiful courtesan Thaïs, seen and admired by him, in his unregenerate days, in the theatre at Alexandria ; and the spirit moves him to return to the city and undertake the conversion of Thaïs. He is warned by the simple monk Palémon, working in his garden, that it is rash to go too far from home in the search of a duty, and that the venerable St. Anthony had said: “ Fish drawn into dry places find there only death ; thus also it chanceth that monks who go forth from their cells to mingle with the children of the century do wander from the way of wisdom.” He is warned by Nicias, the man of the world, to “ beware of offending Venus ; her vengeance is a terrible one.” Following the voice which calls him, he turns a deaf ear to Christian and pagan remonstrances, makes a pilgrimage to Alexandria, visits Thaïs, resists the seduction of her beauty, and accomplishes his mission. The ground has been prepared beforehand. Thaïs, a woman brought up amid surroundings of vice, but in whose heart a neglected childhood had kept forever something of the child, had listened, in early years, to wondrous stories of the Christian religion from the lips of a persecuted slave, the only being who had been kind to her. She hears the message again with yielding ear, obeys it unresistingly, and suffers herself to be led to a convent, where she passes the remainder of her days in sanctity. Paphnuce, on the other hand, returns to his desert, taking with him the dangerous image of her beauty. It establishes itself in his cell, rendering his fasting and prayer of no avail. In vain he undergoes strange and unnatural penances, standing on a pillar, like St. Simon Stylites, and seeing an adoring crowd below healed of its ills by the touch of his pedestal. He cannot obtain peace. The venerable St. Anthony withholds his blessing from one whose soul is revealed to him as possessed by the three demons, Pride, Luxury, and Doubt. Hearing that Thaïs is dying, Paphnuce casts away every thought but that of rage that he should have allowed a happiness to escape him. He hastens to her bedside with a declaration of his love, only to see her pass away in peace, and himself to flee from the scene, a lost soul like Faust, with the stamp of sin upon his face.

Such, roughly outlined, is the story of Thaïs, in which, as will be seen, there is a moral; but no outline can convey an idea of the manner in which it is told, the suavity of touch, the fine, delicate irony. Primarily, it is neither a novel, nor a study of the epoch, nor a philosophic treatise. It is a piece of Parisian platonism, a sort of poem in prose, in which truths are tied up in paradox, and the poetry is infused with a mockery which would be fatal to the poetic spirit, if the two contradictions were not brought into harmony by that individuality which marks all M. France’s writing. Thaïs is not an individual ; she is an incarnation of things ancient, but unextinct, and her grand, impersonal beauty, scarcely described, is felt throughout, like the beauty of Charmides in the dialogue of Plato. The most striking scene in the book is a banquet, cleverly suggestive of the Symposium, — very graceful, though perhaps over-refined in execution, light and fantastic in substance. Stoic, Epicurean, and Arian discuss, with the alternate sequence and negligence of real conversation, questions of philosophy and life, under the inspiring eyes of Thaïs and other courtesans, while Paphnuce, taking no part in the talk, looks on as from another world. He hears many heresies, cynicisms, and utterances of a sacrilegious nature ; a new version of the story of Adam and Eve; a myth of the courtesan; and choice morsels of paradox, like the following, which has a certain novelty, and shows not a little penetration withal: —

“ Hermodore. It is true, Zénothemis, that the soul feeds upon ecstasy as the grasshopper upon dew. But let us go further, and say that the spirit alone is susceptible of entire entrancement; for man is a threefold being, composed of a material body, of a soul, more subtle, but likewise material, and of an incorruptible spirit. When, issuing from the body as from a palace abandoned to sudden silence and solitude, and traversing in flight the gardens of the soul, the spirit loses itself in God, it experiences the anticipated delights of death, or rather of a future life, since to die is to live; and in this condition, which partakes of the divine purity, it possesses at once infinite joy and absolute knowledge. It enters into that unity which is the whole. It is perfect.”

The philosophy of Thaïs is just now being actively discussed in Paris, where protests against its skepticism are made not only by the adherents of established faiths, but by a large party of “young France ” in healthy reaction against the long-préached gospel of negation. What is it, on the whole, this philosophy ? Is it a defense of the Hellenic spirit, a protest against Hebraism, such as Matthew Arnold uttered in far different, graver, more authoritative tones ? We cannot undertake to say. A number of creeds appear to crumble under the persiflage of M. France’s pen ; we find insinuations of malicious irony delicately turned against Hebraism, Christianity, asceticism, systems of philosophy, and theories of creation. If any reader of skeptical yearnings can discover in the book a consistent doctrine of negation, he is welcome to set down his footstool and worship ; if any find a windmill to attack, he will do well to sharpen his lance : the only danger in either case will be that of having overweighed M. France’s gravity as a writer, and undervalued his intelligence. For a reader willing to take a turn round the spheres merely for enjoyment and intellectual exercise, a reader enamored of literary grace, glad of an occasional side-light upon life and of the companionship of a mind of much fineness and individuality, Thaïs may prove a draught of pleasure with a delicate aroma of philosophy.

M. Fabre depicts the strength and the weakness of Catholicism, attacking the pride and self-deceptions of asceticism, but in a spirit and from a point of view as remote as possible from those of M. France. He speaks of these things with the intimate knowledge, the fervid earnestness, of a reformer, and that even in a book of a romantic vein like Le Marquis de Pierrerue. This novel, published in 1873, M. Fabre has now recast and reprinted under the title of Un Illumine,² for the reason, as he explained the other day to a literary acquaintance, that he had always felt dissatisfied with the treatment he had bestowed upon a theme which possessed a strong attraction for him, and had wished for an opportunity to retouch the work, giving it greater conciseness and force. It cannot be otherwise than interesting, and it might be a lesson in criticism of the best sort, to compare the versions made under such circumstances, and to note the passages retrenched or altered by an author when print and time have brought his book for him into a new perspective. Unfortunately, M. Fabre has rewritten his novel mainly with the scissors, an instrument which does not lend itself to the expression of nuances. Le Marquis de Pierrerue was longer than his books usually are, and he has reduced its two volumes to one of closer print; abridging descriptions, condensing conversations, imparting more movement to the story, but too often leaving the action bare of that analysis of motive which gave it value and interest.

In comparing Un Illuminé with its predecessor and original, we find in one or two instances, at least, omissions which injure the force and meaning of the remaining passages ; we find still oftener omitted details of observation which we are sorry to miss for their own sake, for M. Fabre is an analyst as well as a novelist, or rather because he is a novelist. We are inclined to suspect that if the interest flags in Le Marquis de Pierrerue the fault lay in the subject, not in the treatment, and that it exists in Un Illuminé as well. The story is one, not of actual every-day life, but of an experiment in living. Le Marquis de Pierrerue, one of the vieille noblesse, devoted heart and soul to the Catholic Church and to the Royalist cause, and seeing the former attacked by skepticism, the latter shaken by revolutions, conceives the idea of educating public opinion by the formation of a Society of Intellectual Aid. The object of this society is to succor young men of talent who are hampered in their career by poverty, to provide them with the means of study and literary or professional work ; making only one stipulation, — that they shall devote themselves, in return, wholly and for life to the cause of the Catholic Church and of the Royalist party. Noble, disinterested, and self-sacrificing, the marquis is incapable of perceiving the force of any argument lying outside this idea. His own fortune, the fortunes of his friends, the happiness of his daughter, are relentlessly sacrificed to the cause. The ingratitude of his children, as he calls the protégés of the society, is a source of perplexed sadness to him; he is unable to comprehend the revolted pride of the young author, Falgouet, who, caught in the toils of the society by the charms of Mademoiselle Claire de Pierrerue, is retained for the Church by the double fatality of disappointed love and of his intense Breton nature. M. Fabre has created in his books many strong and admirable types of sacerdotal life, developing them by analysis in a manner which has not failed to impress his readers by its resemblance to that of Balzac. Like Balzac, who was a realist not so much by his literary methods or general view of life as by his literary power and detailed observation, M. Fabre has his romantic leanings, and like Balzac he commands respect and attention by his intellectual virility even in those studies where the interest is largely of a fanciful or speculative order. This is the case in the book before us. The Intellectual Aid Society is an allegory, its founder a myth, and the reality or unreality behind them the Catholic Church. To say this is to say that M. Fabre is on ground that he knows thoroughly, but this circumstance makes us regret the more vividly that he should not confine himself to the rendering of the actual every-day aspects of a life with which he is so familiar, and of which he has given us such masterly pictures in L’Abbé Tigrane and Les Courbezon. Not that the characters in Un Illuminé lack vitality ; that of Falgouët is finely worked out, especially at the end, and the blind martyr - bishop of Lha-Ssa, Monseigneur Tamisier, is a portrait in M. Fabre’s strongest and tenderest manner. His account of an interview in which the bishop seeks to interest the marquis’s sister, the superior of a convent, in the marriage of Falgouët with Claire sums up M. Fabre’s long observations on the Church. She inquires if the young man is of noble birth, and on being answered in the negative utters the exclamation “ Ah ! ”

“ Since the day when God, for his glory, permitted me to be deprived of sight, my hearing has acquired by continual exercise an extraordinary acuity of perception. That ‘ Ah! ’ which escaped from the lips of Claire-Antoinette de Pierrerue betrayed such a disappointment, such self-deception, that I could hardly contain myself. What ! to have immolated to God one’s youth and one’s life ; to have lived for thirty years in a cell face to face with Jesus Christ, who died to make all men alike worthy of heaven; to have acquired superhuman virtues, and not yet have succeeded in annihilating pride! . . . Théven, religion in a simple soul produces something like an eternal festival; in the proud soul it may become the cause and excuse of the most odious defects.”